How news is not reported

Last weekend, just after sunset on Saturday night, gunfire erupted a couple blocks from the venue hosting the CIAA basketball tournament. The CIAA is a yearly NCAA tournament of colleges that are historically black, a euphemism for voluntarily segregated by race. The CIAA is funded by tax dollars from the city.

While the shooting event made the AP wire, it was not picked up by any major news outlets outside the Charlotte area. Somewhere between “dozens of bullets” and “100 shots” were fired into cars and nearby houses. The hip hop web sites immediately knew who was being shot at and why. It has taken most of a week for the police and media outlets to catch up, and the story will likely not break into the national news – unless they find a connection to a Trump supporter or a white policeman who owns a Confederate flag

Back around 1982, my father insisted on riding the greyhound bus by himself from Flint to Pittsburgh, which meant changing buses in Detroit. My father was totally blind and had ridden the buses all his life, except he hadn’t ridden a bus since we got our 1962 Rambler around 1968. I offered to drive him back to Pittsburgh, about a six hour drive. He refused.

A guardian angel was looking over him, perhaps literally. In general, bus drivers would go out of their way to protect blind passengers and make sure they made their connections, but that depended a lot on the individual driver.

My sister persisted on riding the bus even when she had a car. Riding the bus has changed a lot. Now you have to make an advance registration, show a photo ID so that you can be scanned in police databases and an arrest arranged en route if you have an outstanding arrest warrant for failing to return a library book 25 years ago. Something to do with fear a hijacker might take the bus to Cuba… the above requirement of course does not apply to Spanish speaking undocumented migrants

Or you ride Megabus or one of the similar Chinese operated bus companies. Of course smoking (even vaping) is out of the question.

Shameful, childish and reprehensible – and that’s just the Charlotte Observer. The idea that this street culture is acceptable in civilized society is an interesting one. How many young Caucasian (teens and twenties) men have you seen driving in their car with hip hop music blasting so loud it shakes the windows nearby? Can someone explain why these upper middle class people think they have some kinship or tie to this music? I can’t imagine how they explain away the murders, beatings, drugs and other crime as being “cool”.

They check ID inconsistently on Greyhound, even now. We were there on Sunday, and the security guards also inconsistently manned the checkpoint that is supposed to keep non-ticketed people out of the “departure lounge” and the boarding area. The one thing they focused on for the 10 minutes before the departure was keeping everyone out of the half of this area that was the boarding area. The lounge has brown tiles and the boarding area white tiles. So it was “Get on the brown tiles.” After doing that diligently, my daughter pointed out that one young woman was allowed to stay unchallenged in the area they kept clearing everyone out of. We had a nice discussion about what possible reasons they had to have left her alone.

Traveling without a male relative or her husband and 5 children? Shocking!

For those unfamiliar, Dearborn is where Henry Ford settled the Arab immigrants he imported from primarily Lebanon and Syria in the 1920s to deal with labor shortages and to fend of labor unions. They are predominantly Christian Arabs who fled Islam who are just as unhappy with mosques popping up in their neighborhood, maybe more so